


It Starts Out As Obsession

by Lyn_Laine



Series: A Matter of Time [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 20:52:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12565956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyn_Laine/pseuds/Lyn_Laine
Summary: Tom Riddle is trapped at Hogwarts, physically connected to his hated enemy, after the Chamber of Secrets incident.  This changes nothing; he is still determined to make sense of Harry Potter.  One-shot.





	It Starts Out As Obsession

It starts out as obsession.

Tom Riddle has spent his entire life ensuring everything is under his control, that he understands everything. But he doesn’t understand Harry Potter. He doesn’t understand at first how such an ordinary person could do something so incredible as to defy a Dark Lord. Later, he thinks he understands - blood magic, it’s that simple.

Except it isn’t that simple, because then Harry Potter starts surviving countless brushes with the Dark Lord seemingly on pure nerve. He always comes out at the end, is always the one who at least survives if not brings victory, and this makes no sense. This is an enigma, a complication, a complexity.

Because Harry Potter is nothing special.

Harry Potter is fair looking, but not incredibly handsome, pale and dark-haired like him but thin with ratty hair and glasses. Harry Potter was originally fooled by his facade like everyone else. Harry Potter comes from a Muggle family he doesn’t like. Harry Potter is a Halfblood. Harry Potter is a Gryffindor, the house Tom Riddle has been taught all his life is simply a place for inferior Slytherins.

And maybe that’s what unnerves him. That Harry Potter has eerie parallels to him. He even speaks Parseltongue.

So Tom doesn’t really know what he’s searching for over the following years at Hogwarts. Maybe he’s obsessed with discovering Potter’s secret so he can defeat him. Maybe he’s obsessed with proving to himself that Potter is really nothing like him.

Tom puts all his focus on it, because what he said is true. His old goals, killing Muggleborns, it doesn’t matter to him anymore. Harry Potter is a far more personal and interesting target. Once Tom discovers Potter’s secret, he can go back to more mundane matters.

So he looks for it, starts conversations with Potter and is secretly amused by how much it seems to unnerve him, and slowly he discovers other things, things he had only half realized before. Like him, Potter grew up knowing nothing. Like him, Hogwarts is the first true home Potter’s ever had. They talk about growing up, about darkness and Muggles, and it’s peculiar to find someone who _understands._ Potter is an interesting conversationalist, more focused on magic and mysteries and castle secrets than on boring or personal matters, and they are capable of quite intense conversations, a bonus Tom wasn’t prepared for. He genuinely finds himself getting lost in talks for what he later realizes is ages. They can even speak to each other in a language no one else can understand.

Potter from the beginning sees him for exactly who he is. He stands up to him in a way no one else does, fire blazing in his eyes, knows just enough about Tom to make him genuinely angry and is just stupid enough not to care, but there is no anger or hatred there - not the way Tom expected there to be.

Potter, he realizes incredulously, has _forgiven_ him. Which would ignite his utter contempt, if not for the fact that Potter has not willfully and delusionally blinded himself in the process. He still sees clearly. He just chooses not to be angry over it.

Which is ridiculous, because Potter has _every reason_ to be angry.

It’s around this time that old Horcruxes start popping up around him and he has episodes of crippling pain. It alarms him. His soul can’t be putting itself back together - can it?

That’s when he discovers Harry Potter is a Horcrux.

Haunted, searching, he discovers other things. His body, mind, and soul are all connected to Harry Potter’s - but so is his magic. They have twin wand cores, the only two from their phoenix. Their wands won’t fight each other.

He would assume that’s the trick - Harry Potter is just him. But then he thinks of Potter’s annoying staunch morality, the fire blazing in his eyes as he argues surprisingly intelligently and passionately with Tom, his penchant for love and friendship, his clear-eyed forgiveness, and he thinks that this can’t be true. Potter is obsessed with Quidditch and a Gryffindor and sometimes a slacker and has a wry sense of humor and he cares nothing for appearances and he’s not Tom.

He’s not Tom. So now Tom is even more confused. He feels like he’s back to square one.

The Horcruxes keep appearing around him. His soul keeps putting itself back together.

He starts feeling weird moments of anger. He begins punishing people who hurt Harry Potter, claiming to himself that he is simply protecting his Horcrux, but more than that he punishes the people who flirt with Harry - both boys and girls, as the wizarding world is very sexually open and usually pansexual - and this he doesn’t understand at all. The feeling of helpless rage that fills him when people chase after Harry bewilders him at first.

It’s because Harry doesn’t want the advances, he tells himself. Tom has realized that Harry is modest and retiring, rather eccentric considering who he is, and he finds fame irritating.

Harry finally confronts him. “You can’t just curse anyone who bothers me!” he shouts.

“I was doing you a favor,” says Tom stiffly.

“Well don’t, because I don’t need favors! You want to do me a favor? Stop hurting people!” Harry shouts.

It is ridiculous. But it is refreshing to find someone who _doesn’t_ want favors, and if that is what he wants… “I’ll take your request,” says Tom.

He tries not hurting people and finds that most things blow over without the use of horrific curses. This surprises him.

Dumbledore surprises them by deciding to show them memories of Tom’s other self. “You want to show this to a future Dark Lord?” Tom raises an eyebrow, standing beside Harry, who looks just as confused.

“Tom, you’re not hurting or targeting Muggleborns. You’re not in fact hurting anyone. And I suspect your soul is stitching yourself back together. Your ambitions seem more confined to Hogwarts. What exactly makes you a Dark Lord?” says Dumbledore politely.

And Tom hates him in that moment, because as usual he has no good answer. It just… it just isn’t like that, that’s all!

But the lessons in the Pensieve surprise Tom. He ends up sitting with Harry, talking about some of the things they’ve seen. Harry is both annoying and oddly touching. He calls Tom’s mother “defeated” and feels sorry for Tom growing up without a mother. It is entirely unnecessary, but nauseatingly good Harry Potter goes there anyway - and even seems sincere, after everything both incarnations of Tom have put him through. He makes genuinely funny, thoughtful comments to lighten up heavier moments, asks questions without seeming to judge, and when they get to the part about Horcruxes he asks Tom if he has continued going down that path.

“... No,” Tom admits, thinking of the Horcruxes returning to him, of Harry’s horror when he learned what Horcruxes were. “Too many liabilities. I’m thinking of getting into alchemy.”

For some reason, Harry smiles. Dumbledore, annoyingly, would also have been inordinately pleased.

Tom and Harry begin a continuous witty repartee; it always manages to draw him in. He realizes that he likes Harry’s eyes, soft green, the way they gleam when he’s intent about something. Harry introduces Tom tentatively to his friends, and for a bunch of blood traitors and Muggleborns and Gryffindors and misfits, they are enjoyable to be around and intelligent and isn’t that a weird thought.

When his other self comes back, he almost thinks about returning to him. But instead he looks at Harry’s body stretched out in the hospital bed, the thin taut muscles, strong but so delicate and breakable, smaller than him, and he feels a peculiar sort of fury and tenderness.

“... Tom?” says Harry tentatively.

Tom looks up coldly. “I’m going to help you,” he decides. “Because there is room for only one of me in this world.”

Harry’s pause and then his slow smile make Tom feel like he has won something, understood something, produces a strange and painful and new and wondrous feeling inside his chest. He likes Harry’s smile.

He may have finally understood, though not with words, and he realizes that by this point he no longer wants to leave.

“Love,” Dumbledore murmurs to him on his way out of the hospital wing, “it is an incredible and wondrous thing.” He sounds amazed himself.

Tom pauses, his eyes widening. “... That’s what it feels like?”

“I suspect so,” Dumbledore admits, smiling. Tom thinks back on all the moments when he has wanted to reach out and gently stroke Harry, on the cheek or on the hand or through the bedhead hair, and it is embarrassing and infuriating but he realizes something.

“I finally understand,” he says, “why you all fight for it so hard.”

It is a kind of admission. He tries to talk himself out of this new state of mind, but from the beginning he realizes it’s one of the only things that is really and truly hopeless.

He begins getting flushed and embarrassed around Harry, and only then does he feel like a human and a teenager, and he realizes as he leans toward Harry eagerly smiling that this is not as bad as he thought it was.

It is no longer hurting people that he wants. Protection, he realizes. He wants to protect, keep safe, cherish and treasure. Out of everything he has won and achieved, Harry Potter is by far the best thing he’s ever succeeded at.


End file.
